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EDITORS’ NOTES

Richard D. James has always excelled at either cloaking listeners in warm-blanket ambiance or clobbering them with manic dance music. These lost vinyl pressings of pre-Aphex Twin tracks are a decade old, yet they still sound beamed from another plane — a sinister place where a kid complains about mashed potatoes and is slapped by dad’s drum & bass record collection, where a desperate housewife imitates her husband ("get me another tea/ get me another shirt/ ev-er-y day") to the tune of crisscrossing melodic synth lines. Highly experimental and wholly accessible — in other words, absolutely recommended.

Hangable Auto Bulb

EDITORS’ NOTES

Richard D. James has always excelled at either cloaking listeners in warm-blanket ambiance or clobbering them with manic dance music. These lost vinyl pressings of pre-Aphex Twin tracks are a decade old, yet they still sound beamed from another plane — a sinister place where a kid complains about mashed potatoes and is slapped by dad’s drum & bass record collection, where a desperate housewife imitates her husband ("get me another tea/ get me another shirt/ ev-er-y day") to the tune of crisscrossing melodic synth lines. Highly experimental and wholly accessible — in other words, absolutely recommended.

TITLE

TIME

Children Talking

5:22

Hangable Auto Bulb

6:52

Laughable Butane Bob

3:02

Bit

0:11

Custodian Discount

4:30

Wabby Legs

5:35

Every Day

3:50

Arched Maid Via RDJ

5:23

8 Songs, 34 Minutes

℗ 1995 Warp Records Limited

About AFX

Maverick electronic music producer Richard D. James is known most prominently as Aphex Twin. Second among his aliases, ahead of relatively less used tags like Polygon Window, Caustic Window, and the Tuss, is AFX. Compared to Aphex, AFX material tends to be less frenetic and consistently beat-oriented, yet it's easily identifiable as the work of James. Although the first volume of Analogue Bubblebath, released in 1991, was originally credited to the Aphex Twin, the 12" series -- through subsequent volumes and reissues -- was eventually associated with AFX. As James garnered acclaim and a loyal following with the first two Aphex Twin albums, he also remixed tracks, including Seefeel's "Time to Find Me" and Baby Ford's "Normal," as AFX. In 1995, the same year James released ...I Care Because You Do as Aphex Twin, he also issued a pair of AFX EPs titled Hangable Auto Bulb. The following decade, the majority of the 12" Analord series trickled out as the work of AFX, as did Orphaned Deejay Selek 2006-2008, which topped Billboard's Top Electronic Albums chart in 2015. ~ Andy Kellman